Home and Away with Teaching Thursday

Posted on February 16, 2012 by | Leave a comment

People have recently asked me what I do on Monday, Tuesdays, Wednesday, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays when Teaching THURSDAY is not available to stimulate, inspire, annoy, and critique.

So, I told them that there were plenty of opportunities to talk about teaching here at the University of North Dakota without having to wait until Thursday (although, we all accepted that Thursday was the BEST day to talk about teaching).  To highlight one particularly exciting time to think about not just teaching but the balance between teaching, research, service, and life outside of the university (if such a thing exists), I strongly recommend spending some quality time at the Graduate School’s 2012 Scholarly Forum. This is the only major forum for research from across the entire campus.

In particular, I recommend one of the first panels on the Monday February 27th will focus on “The Publish or Perish Syndrome”. It’s a 8:50 am in the Badlands Room, but it will TOTALLY be worth it.  He’s the description of the panel and short biographies of the contributors:

The Publish or Perish Syndrome: Setting Realistic Goals, Finding Balance and Success in Scholarly Writing

The “Publish or Perish Syndrome” continues to put demands especially on tenure seeking faculty that ultimately affects their overall productivity as well as the quality of work for the graduate students they advise, teach, or mentor in various research projects. The panelists will make brief presentations and field audience questions pertaining to overcoming this writing syndrome. Key writing issues that the panelist will explore include: Best strategies for increasing writing efficiency, setting realistic goals in scholarly writing, monitoring progress toward personal writing goals, creating and supporting a community of scholarly writers, and sharing tips/techniques for a healthy work and life balance to ensure success in writing for publication.

About the Panelists:

Drs Sagini Keengwe, Rick Van Eck, Robert Stupnisky (Teaching and Learning Department) and Dr Cynthia Prescott (History Department) are all prolific writers in their areas of specialization. They have authored and/or edited scholarly books/book chapters, and several journals articles in different refereed journals. Drs Keengwe, Van Eck, and Prescott are North Dakota Spirit Faculty Achievement Award Past Recipients.

Sagini Keengwe is an associate professor of education at UND. His research focuses on computer technology integration into classroom instruction, diversity issues in teacher education programs, and constructivist pedagogy in teaching and learning. His current work examines Online Professional Development Practices in K-12 and Higher Education.

Rick Van Eck is an associate professor of Instructional Technology at UND and directs the Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) graduate program. His research focuses primarily on simulations and games for learning, including the design of learning games and the integration of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games in K-12 classrooms.

Cynthia Prescott is an assistant professor of History at UND. Her book, “Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier” traces changes in gender roles and ideology among the first two generations of white settlers in Oregon.  Her current project examines representations of frontier life in pioneer monuments erected throughout the American West from 1900 to the present.

Robert Stupnisky has been an assistant professor of Higher Education at UND since August 2010. He teaches courses on research, scholarly writing, statistics, and college student motivation. Dr Stupnisky’s research focuses on the psychosocial factors affecting individuals transitioning into new post-secondary educational settings, such as their first-year of college and newly hired faculty.

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But, what if you can’t come to the panel a week from Monday? Or you still need more thoughtful conversations about teaching?

Well, first, you should check our Twitter Feed regularly and go and check out who we follow.

Next, be sure the check out these great teaching related website:

ProfHacker and Casting Out Nines from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Open Education covers a wide range of topics.

The Teaching Professor blog at Faculty Focus.

TCU’s Teaching Technology blog is fantastic for those who teach online or want to add some technology to their blog.

Bryn Mawr College’s Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education is new and exciting.

UND’s own Mark Grabbe offers regular insights into teaching on his beautiful blog Learning Aloud.

Check out the Scholarly Forum and surf the web for teaching related comment!

And keep Teaching Thursday in mind as an outlet for brilliant teaching ideas from any field!

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Posted in Bill Caraher

Participation Grades

Posted on February 9, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Cynthia Prescott, Department of History, University of North Dakota

As a History professor who believes whole-heartedly in the value of active learning pedagogy, I am excited to be experimenting this semester with incorporating active learning modules into a “small” section of the US History survey course.  Where my colleagues and I typically teach 150 students in a crowded lecture bowl, this term I am teaching 50 students in a classroom with moveable tables and chairs.  In my experience, North Dakota students’ reputation for being unwilling to speak in public is well-founded.  Nonetheless, I have been pleased with my students’ greater willingness to participate in brief “Think – Pair – Share” discussions interspersed with lecture material.  Most students seem eager to compare notes and ideas with a neighbor seated with them at a two-person desk, and roughly a dozen students regularly contribute to full-class discussions.  Yet this still leaves 75% of the class not speaking in the full-class “public” setting.  I am struggling to find ways to fairly assess their contributions.

In my upper-division classes, which enroll 25-35 students, it takes me several weeks to get to know each of the students well enough to be able to fairly measure their contributions to small-group and full-class discussions.  I’ve developed various methods to learn those names, from individual appointments with each student to going old-school and calling roll regularly.  But I’m wary to utilize these techniques with a class of 50 students.  To be honest, I haven’t even tried, because it feels too daunting (especially on top of needing to know the names of students in my two other, smaller classes).

In some ways, it was easier when I was teaching 150 students.  They didn’t expect me to learn their names, and neither did I.  Students formed permanent “small groups” of 3-6 students, and each small group was responsible for submitting weekly writing assignments that could be easily assessed (read: graded) by my GTAs.  While this model was efficient –at least in terms of grading efforts – it did not encourage students to think deeply.  Instead, most students rushed through the assignments, content to pick up some easy points (albeit less than full credit on each assignment) and then escape class early, rather than truly engaging in the material.

In an ideal world, within each of my classes (regardless of class size) I would learn each student’s name within the first week of the term.  Or, perhaps more to the point, in an ideal world I wouldn’t have to assign participation grades, because my students would be motivated to participate for the sheer love of learning.  But living in the real world, I find myself stuck.  How can I motivate all of my students to understand the course material?  How can I fairly assess students’ individual contributions in a class that, while no longer enormous, still feels unwieldy?  How can I measure students’ participation efforts, rather than their attendance?  Help me, please!

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Posted in Cynthia Prescott, Participation Grades

Teaching and Learning in the University of 1965

Posted on February 2, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Last week, retired professor of history Playford Thorson passed away. He was a member of the Department of History from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s and witnessed some of the key transitions at the University of North Dakota. In the early 1960s, he and a group of his young colleagues – frequently called the “Young Turks” –  were instrumental in pushing the university to adapt to changing professional standards, to incorporate new classroom practices, and to recognize the challenges facing higher education during a period of demographic and institutional transformation.

This group of enthusiastic young faculty members developed a strident reputation and, at their peak, prepared a manifesto identifying the problems facing the university in the 1960s and suggesting changes. The famous Letter of the 25 to President George Starcher offered some substantial criticism of the University at that time, and while it is difficult to know whether this criticism was justified, the nature of the critique offers a view of conversations on campus which have some uncanny resemblances to conversations continuing on campus across the country today.

A primary concern for the Young Turks was the difficulties modifying “student culture”. They argued that students are too willing “to accept passively the doctrines presented to them rather than raise meaningful questions.” Students tend “to listen uncritically” and lack the preparation early in their university careers to reach their full potential.  The 25 recommend a series of one-credit freshman classes designed to introduce new students to the range of course available at the university. In another place they see the potential of eroding the “occasionally artificiality of department boundaries” and recommend that the university do more to foster collaboration between faculty and cross listing of courses (while avoiding terms like synergies). They also looked to ways to manage distractions on campus and build a more vital student life in the residence halls. In a more innocent age, they even recommend funds be made available for faculty who invite students to their homes for “academically justifiable purposes”.

The 25 also offered some interesting critiques of the university’s treatment of faculty. They urged the university to do more the foster the development of new faculty and prevent their idealism from being “destroyed or… driven underground”.  Faculty resources, library facilities, and an increased emphasis on academic matters at the expense of other distractions would all foster the retention of younger faculty. While many of these suggestions have been heeded, retention of junior faculty remains a priority on campus, and it does not seem entirely separate from issues of teaching and student achievement.

They conclude by saying:

“We have been critical — intentionally so — in this statement. Not all of us agree to each of the proposals suggested. All of us, however, are in sympathy with the fundamental aims set forth and the desire to strengthen our institution. We add, in conclusion, that the criticisms we have express stem not from personal animosity nor from our lack of fair in your desire to improve the University and your ability to lead effectively to that end. Were our attitudes and beliefs otherwise, we would have prepared this statement or submitted it for your consideration. The numerous innovations and improvements you have instituted in the past decade are recognized and respected. We now ask that you move us toward new goals and aspirations.”

 

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Posted in Bill Caraher

On Teaching

Posted on January 31, 2012 by | Leave a comment

The Spring 2012 (Number 4) On Teaching newsletter from the University of North Dakota’s Office of Instructional Development is now available!

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Posted in On Teaching

What Do Students Owe Their Teachers?

Posted on January 26, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Michael Beltz, Department of Philosophy & Religion, University of North Dakota

As the modern university system becomes more focused on a contractual model of education, an increasing attention ends up being paid to the various obligations and rights that the different members of the contractual relationship have to one another. This focus seems to have its philosophical basis on the notion that higher education is a social institution. Like any social intuition, higher education not only has common goals and values, but it also establishes distinct role morality for all of its members. The social institution places individuals into discrete positions and establishes the proper standard of conduct for individuals within those roles. One important aspect of social institutions is that the roles and obligations generated by those roles are primarily in relationship to the larger collective values and goals. Thus, the responsibilities of a student role end up emphasizing what students owe higher education itself.  For example, a student may have the obligation to be academically honest. This obligation tends to focus on how dishonesty undermines the goals of higher education, like creating an informed citizenry; if large numbers of students are regularly dishonest, the end result is a citizenry that is no more informed than if those students had not attended a higher education institution.

Understanding the contractualization of higher education as only establishing obligations between the individual roles and the goals and values of the social institution misses a key component of contractual relationships. Contractual relationships do not just establish obligations between the roles and the social institution; they also establish the obligations that the individual roles have to each other. Instructors in the higher education social institution often think through what they owe the students. What is less often considered is the question of what students owe their teachers.

In his 1988 book, Another Sort of Learning, James Schall directly addresses this question. Schall focuses his third chapter on the title question “What a Student Owes His Teacher.” Before explaining what students owe teachers, Schall gives a compelling vision of the social benefits and core value of education. He argues that education is about finding ‘inner truth.’ By this he means that students will come to a better and more accurate worldview that is based in reality. When the student has done learning, they will grasp the working of the world they live in better than they did before starting the educational process. Schall states: “The student ought to become independent of the teacher to the point of even forgetting his name, but not the truth he learned.”

To reach this goal, Schall lays out a list of four obligations that the student owes his or her teachers. At first glance this list may seem overly narrow and modest, but this is intentional. Schall is attempting to focus on the interrelational obligations of the student to the teacher, not the student’s obligations to the social institution or the student’s obligations to himself or herself. He argues that the student owes: (1) In the first week of classes, at least, the student owes the teacher a moderately good will towards the teacher. This is a confidence to admit to oneself that the teacher probably has thought through the subject and knows where the instruction will lead. (2) An amount of faith that the student can learn something that seems unlearnable in the beginning. This is a trust the student must have in himself or herself. (3) “The virtue of docility,” which is the fact that they must allow themselves to be taught. He further articulates this as open-mindedness to the subject and instruction. (4) A willingness to engage in the effort of study. This is the ability and desire to ignore distractions and other desires to try to learn.

While some may look at this list of obligations and consider it to be too small to capture all of the things a student owes a teacher, my reaction is that this list may actually include too many obligations. When we consider the nature of obligations, we must be able to find a harm that might occur if the obligation is not fulfilled. In the case of an obligation to a person, there must be a potential that the person to whom we have an obligation will be worse off if the obligation is not fulfilled. When we consider what students owe their teachers, as articulated by Schall, it is not clear how the instructor is being harmed when any of the obligations are not fulfilled. Consider two different students who might enter the classroom. The first student has good will toward the teacher; this student fully embraces the fact that the teacher has a more thorough understanding of the subject and knows where the course will lead. The second student has absolutely no good will toward the teacher; this student does not believe that the teacher better understands the subject matter or course trajectory. This second student cares nothing about the subject matter, but has the desire to meet the credit requirement. This student does not want to learn, but wants the outward benefits of passing the course (for example, they want the course credits on their transcript and want positive benefits to their grade point average). There is good reason to believe that the second student has harmed the goals of ‘inner learning’ and being party to an informed citizenry; that student has not learned anything and will not make more informed decisions that they would have without having taken the course. But this does not mean that the second student has harmed the teacher. We can further imagine that the second student has learned how to appear to be a student of good will. Without having learned this, the student might not pass the course or might negatively affect his or her grade point average. In short, the student owes it to himself or herself to appear to be a student of good will. The first student, on the other hand, we might imagine, has not developed the social skills to seem to have good will. When he or she attempts to make statements expressing good will, they come out awkwardly and are easily misunderstood as being of bad intention. Which of these students poses more potential harm to their teacher? It is the first student that is most likely to disrupt the flow of the teaching, to agitate the teacher, to undermine the confidence of the teacher, and to sow discord within the fellow students about the competence of the teacher.

It does not seem that students actually owe their teachers the inner mental state of good will. Instead, the student owes the teacher the appearance of good will. I believe that the same conclusions can be reached with the other three points that Schall argues students owe their teachers. The student owes the teacher the appearance of good will, the appearance of being open-minded, the appearance of trust in himself or herself, and the appearance of being willing to ignore other distractions. This does not mean that the four qualities that Schall highlights are not valuable for the student; they are. These seem to be qualities that the student owes himself or herself, but not the teacher. This is because it is the student who is harmed when they do not have these internal mental qualities; the teacher is only harmed when the student does not have the outward appearance of these qualities.

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Posted in Michael Beltz, Student Expectations

Reflective Writing

Posted on January 19, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

The great philosopher of history, R.G. Collingwood, famously argued that all history is the history of thought. In Collingwood’s estimation, the historian re-enacts that past in his (for Collingwood, the historian was always a “he”) own mind when he reads a historical text or studies objects from the past. While rethinking the thoughts of the actors who participated in a past event, the historian is aware and critical of his own thinking about the past. This critical practice distinguished “the best kind of historian” from other people who make it a habit of merely assembling evidence into an orderly presentation and passing it off as some kind of objective or impartial truth. Collingwood saw the ability and responsibility of historians to think past thoughts as key to the role history plays in the production of human knowledge. In fact, he argued that history was the only discipline that produced human self-knowledge.

While his arguments for the autonomy of history have not received universal acceptance, Collingwood has contributed to how I think about reflective writing in the classroom. Over the course of expounding his larger argument, Collingwood noted in an offhand way that when he reads something he wrote days before, he acts the part of the historian by reflecting on his own writing and using it to reconstruct a past thought.

This was a helpful idea to me as I sat down to struggle with constructing assignments for my graduate historiography seminar. Graduate historiography is a required course for all M.A., D.A., and Ph.D. students in history in our department. Generally, the course elicits a kind of exaggerated dread because it is designed to force students to examine their assumptions and practices as historians. In general, historians regard an ability to recognize one’s own disciplinary, historical, and social assumptions about the past as a crucial step in a student’s development in the profession. The course, then, insists that students reflect and own up to their own position in relation to the process and methods of historical thinking.

Reflective writing has become an important part of encouraging students to write and think about a text, situation, or body of material. Generally, the practice has allowed students a certain amount of latitude in how they approach a subject and has sought to instill confidence in students by recognizing the authenticity of their own engagement with material.  This goals of reflective writing are particularly suitable for my graduate historiography class where I introduce the students to any number of challenging texts and push them to embrace often uncomfortable critiques leveled against longstanding academic practices. This can be, as you might imagine, a difficult task as the students tend to resist the most critical challenges to traditional historical practices. To allow students to engage these critiques in a safe place, I require reflective essays each week that respond to the readings assigned. These then become, to some extent, the basis for our discussion in the seminar.

Traditionally, graduate historiography seminars require students to, say, write a few critical book reviews and perhaps write a longer paper on a particular aspect of historical practice (e.g. women’s history, microhistory, Marxist history, et c.). These are boring things to read and largely reproduce the kind of exercises that students write in their other graduate history courses. On the one hand, historical works tend to be boring, so having students write boring assignments does not make them less useful. And, using an assignment in a graduate historiography class to reinforce skills developed elsewhere in the program can be a good thing. Increasingly, however, I want my graduate historiography seminar to encourage students to engage critically and reflectively with difficult ideas.

So, in the spirit of Collingwood, I ask my students to take their reflective writing, compile it into an archive, and to write a historical paper based that uses these reflective texts as “primary sources”. The goal is, of course, to get the students to think about how they thought about writing history. In Collingwoodian terms, I am asking the students to re-enact, critically, their own learning process.

In other words, it’s an effort to close the loop.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Graduate Instruction, Reflective Writing

Faculty Study Seminar: Teaching and Neuroscience

Posted on January 17, 2012 by | Leave a comment

This spring OID is running a Faculty Study Seminar on James’ Zull’s  From Brain to Mind: Using Neuroscience to Guide Change in Education (Stylus, 2011). The seminars provide a means for faculty with common interests to learn more about a teaching-related topic. Each group meets four times a semester, at times mutually agreed to by participants, to read and discuss a teaching-related book (books provided by OID). Your only obligation is to read and to show up for discussion.

If you are familiar with James Zull’s 2004 book, The Art of Changing the Brain, you know he has both a keen interest in how the brain learns and a knack for making specialized research accessible and relatable to what we do in higher education.  In his latest book, Zull (Professor of Biochemistry and former Director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve) considers how recent findings in neuroscience can inform our teaching practice.  Looking at how the brain receives and processes information, he gleans applicable insights about cognitive development and metacognition.  Zull argues that due to major social and economic change, a teaching and learning approach that is informed by cognitive science is increasingly necessary.  In an environment in which our students can expect to hold multiple jobs (some of which may not yet exist), where technology is constantly shifting, and where information and opinion seem infinitely available, the awareness of how and why we think as we do is essential to society’s well-being.

If you are interested in participating in this FSS, please contact Anne Kelsch  at anne.kelsch@email.und.edu or 777-4233.

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